Romances of the archive in contemporary British fiction

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Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. In the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, critic Don D'Ammassa argues that it is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed. As Dickens's best-known work of historical fiction, A Tale of Two Cities is said to be one of the best-selling novels of all time. In 2003, the novel was ranked 63rd on the BBC's The Big Read poll. The novel has been adapted for film, television, radio, and the stage, and has continued to influence popular culture.

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Dai Smith

"'Dream on' is a black comedy, a flashlight noir thriller, a meditation on the lives and stories that connect up the frayed wires in the business of living" - dust jacket.

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Georgette Heyer

The spirited and independent Miss Annis Wychwood is a beautiful heiress, and hopelessly single, has twenty-nine and well past the age for falling in love. When she sponsored young pretty Miss Lucilla Carleton's "coming out," the town's social elite were shocked. After all, how could Annis find Lucilla a husband when she could not choose one for herself? Then Lucilla's handsome and egotistical uncle and guardian, Mr. Oliver Carleton, arrived to approve the sponsorship. But when Annis embroils herself in the affairs of the runaway heiress, Lucilla, she is destined to see a great deal of her fugitive's uncivil and high-handed guardian, Oliver. Befriending the wayward girl brings unexpected consequences, among them the conflicting emotions aroused by her guardian, whose reputation as the rudest man in London precedes him. Chafing at the restrictions of Regency society in Bath, Annis has to admit that at least Carleton is never boring. And his brash and rakish manner quickly succumbed to the will of Annis, this remarkable heiress no man had yet subdued. Outrageous as he is, the charming Annis ends up finding him absolutely irresistible.

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Julius Rowan Raper

By the mid-195Os, when Saul Bellow published Seize the Day, French existentialism and the phenomenological view of humankind that underlies it had become popular enough in the United States and England for leading novelists to begin dealing critically with its fundamental assumptions. Taking as its starting point the critique of existentialism's phenomenological background derived from Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, Julius Rowan Raper's Narcissus from Rubble delves into the intellectual assumptions that lie behind eleven of the most influential and challenging novels created by Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, Jerzy Kosinski, John Barth, and Lawrence Durrell. Raper sees the central conflict of twentieth-century humanistic inquiry as the modern opposition between psychology and philosophy. He dramatizes the competition in the novels between the phenomenological model of human behavior and a variety of models associated with psychoanalysis, especially those created by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Heinz Kohut. He argues that despite numerous efforts to fuse phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the two conceptions of personality have been fundamentally opposed to each other since Husserl's original description of phenomenology. The book underscores the irony that while much contemporary literary criticism continues to draw on a phenomenologically based view of character derived in part from the essays of Jacques Lacan, our leading novelists for a quarter century have been warning us in major novels such as Henderson the Rain King, V., and The Magus of the rage, compulsiveness, emptiness, pointlessness, fragmentation, and associated dangers to which taking a phenomenological stance may contribute. Raper finds that all six novelists worked through the intellectual maze that Freud called narcissism, as well as through the hazards of self-transcendence, to a new understanding of narcissism that is less judgmental and more perceptive than Freud's earlier formulation. It is this struggle--first to comprehend the dangers of the self-transcending tendencies of our culture, and then to become completely true to ourselves beyond the roles imposed on us by life--that creates the drama Raper detects as the common component in the works studied in this book. Raper's approach offers exciting insights into some fascinating and difficult literary texts. By revealing the common concern on which they rest, he provides the reader with an illuminating way to approach other contemporary works of literature.